Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry―Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima. At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes him stories about beautiful and impossible things. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and unsettling linked collection that lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. With a singular voice in the narrative-bending tradition of Kafka, Cortázar, and Bulgakov, Lima speaks to Brazilian-American immigrant experiences – of ambition, fear, heartbreak, and home – with equal parts warmth and agitation. Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry – Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a powerful experience: once read, you’re as much a part of the stories as they’re a part of you.
Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasilia, Brazil, now living in Chicago. She’s the author of the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft: Stories I wrote for the Devil is her fiction debut.
Review: The Meta Layers of Craft, Chicago Review of Books
Read: Antropófaga, Kenyon Review
Prompt: Write about a time when you’ve been unlucky. Now write about a character who is experiencing unusually bad luck on their first day of work. See if you can build connections between your story and the fiction you’ve just written. Use a mind map if you need.